29 WD Blue Desktop Ha Hard Drive 4TB

Wi Win the storage wars with this drive

If you have a desktop PC in a tower case, it should be fairly simple to add more storage internally. Having removedemoved the cover, you’ll just need to identifyntify a standard 3.5in drive bay, of whichhich most systems will have at least one or two free, and power and data cablesles to attach the new drive to the PC’S SATATA interface and power supply unit.

If you’re replacing an existinging drive, you just plug everything back into the new one, but it usually makes more sense to keep using it. For a summaryary of what’s involved, see the advice at www.snipca. com/24887 from the computerer repair enthusiasts at ifixit.com. As long as you own a screwdriver or two, the only remaining question is which drive to buy.

Most current PCS come with a oneor two-terabyte drive, but the more capacity you buy the cheaper it gets pound-for-pound, and at the moment the best value size is 4TB. Buy this WD model and you’ll probably never need to upgrade again.

The Blue series is the cheaper consumer range from Western Digital, costing little more than half as much as its professionallevel Black drives. The savings come at the expense of performance and durability. This Blue drive is neither the fastest around, nor is it recommended for PCS that are continuously loading and saving data all day. For most users, though, it should give several years of reliable service, and if you wanted top performance you should probably be looking at a smaller but speedier SSD.

On paper, the WD Blue isn’t as fast as the equivalent Barracuda drive from the other leading hard-drive manufacturer, Seagate. Our tests disagreed. Overall it was slightly quicker, and its lead was greatest when reading and writing random files and when loading programs – the sort of thing your main hard drive would spend most of its time doing. Even in demanding read- and write-speed tests, the Seagate was unable to press its advantage, and the WD Blue was slightly but noticeably quieter in use.

Both drives are very power-efficient, using only around five watts, but the Seagate does draw less in idle and standby modes, although we’re speaking of amounts of electricity that would cost only pennies a year.

Great value for money, quicker than its rivals and it runs very quietly